COURTESY OF U.S. POSTAL SERVICE A set of U.S. Postal Service stamps based on a painting by Hilo artist John D. Dawson went on sale nationwide yesterday.

New stamp expands
Hilo artist’s reach

John Dawson’s latest wildlife art
is on sale in U.S. post offices

HILO » When Hilo artist John D. Dawson walked along a trail in the semidarkness of the early evening in Yellowstone National Park, he mistakenly came between a mother black bear and her cubs.

The bear grunted some orders for her cubs to get up a tree, then charged at Dawson. He picked a tree for himself, climbing as high as he could in a 20-foot lodgepole pine.

"I was in panic mode, jet propulsion," he said.

A new set of U.S. Postal Service stamps based on a painting by Dawson includes a black bear similar to the one he met in Yellowstone. The major difference is that Dawson's painting shows an eastern broadleaf forest rather than a western pine forest.

The sheet of 10 stamps is called Northeast Deciduous Forest, the seventh in the "Nature of America" series of the Postal Service. The first in 1999 was the Sonoran Desert, and the one with a setting most similar to Hawaii was Pacific Coral Reef last year.

Dawson painted them all.

Dawson and his wife moved to Hilo in 1989. They had been living in Idaho. "We were experiencing eight months of winter, and we thought maybe it would be nice to live where we really loved it."

Dawson knew from his childhood in San Diego that he wanted to be an artist, and was supported by his parents. He graduated from the Art Center School in Los Angeles in 1959.

His father also inspired a lifelong interest in nature, taking him into the Laguna Mountains near San Diego when he was not yet 4 years old. He still remembers deer coming down to a watering hole to drink.

A buck can be seen in his Northeast forest painting, standing near a pond with a beaver lodge in the center.

A prominent turkey in the painting recalls various times that wild turkeys have come to "visit" with Dawson while he sat in the woods.

Some of the 27 plants and animals in Dawson's painting will be alien to longtime Hawaii residents, such as the red eft, a kind of small salamander. The backside of the sheet of stamps has a numbered key to identify each species.

Dawson has been doing paintings for the National Geographic since the 1980s, work that eventually brought him to the attention of the Postal Service.

The Northeast forest stamps were officially released Thursday in New York City at the Postage Stamp Mega-Event of the American Stamp Dealers Association at Madison Square Garden.

As the featured artist, Dawson's duties including signing his name on sheets of the stamps and on envelopes with his stamps known as first-day covers.

The Postal Service also unveiled a feature never tried before, a 28-page Artist's Sketch Book showing Dawson's preparatory drawings along with his comments on the plants and animals shown. For more information, see www.usps.com/shop.

The Northeast forest stamps went on sale nationwide yesterday.